Enero y febrero

En español

• ¿Qué hacía Jane Austen por las mañanas?, sobre la vida diaria de las mujeres ricas en la Inglaterra victoriana.
• Guantánamo, 19 años después: Biden vuelve a chocar con el limbo legal de EEUU
• Cómo hacer que un youtuber pague impuestos aunque viva en Andorra, sobre fórmulas para el pago de impuestos adaptadas al siglo XXI
• El coste de un ministerio, sobre el coste de un ministerio en España, con el ejemplo del ministerio de Igualdad.

Videos

• CppCon 2019: Matt Godbolt “Compiler Explorer: Behind The Scenes”, on how godbolt.org works.
• YouTubers have to declare ads. Why doesn’t anyone else?, on promoted content and the Internet.

TV Show, movies & documentaries

• La Comunidad. A rewatch of one of my favorite Spanish movies.
• Greener Grass. It could have been fun if it was like, 20 minutes instead of 95.
• The Shivering Truth. It’s… interesting?
• Better Call Saul (season 4 & season 5). People didn’t like the first season of the show as much as I do, but I think it’s worth re-watching.

Books

• Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives. A good book to read if you live in the US or like neoliberalism, maybe not so much otherwise.

Computer Science

No math stuff on this edition :( I am slowly going through Gelman’s Bayesian Data Analysis and Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why but I am having trouble to find the time to read :(

• Are we distributed yet? We are not, but this page tracks it.
• In-the-Wild Series: Chrome Infinity Bug, an article that gives you another perspective on how incredibly terrible Javascript typing system is.
• We now have a Rust Foundation!
• Memory Safe ‘curl’ for a More Secure Internet: on new Rust-written TLS, HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 backends for curl which will hopefully become the default backends.
• εxodus ETIP: The Canonical Database for Tracking Trackers, a tracker database for examing codebases for F-Droid.
• Introducing State Partitioning – Mozilla Hacks, on the new cookie behavior on Firefox, which will come to other browsers at some point

Science & economics

• Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics, Scott Alexander is back to talk about the classification of mental ilness. My inner logical positivist doesn’t love the framing of is mental ilness a thing but the article is pretty good.
• Why $15 minimum wage is pretty safe on why you shouldn’t trust economists’ consensus and how the US 15$ minimum wage seems pretty safe even for someone who is not a leftist.
• How are working hours measured and what can we learn from the data?
• I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go? Badly.
• Who Gains and Who Loses from Credit Card Payments? Theory and Calibrations I would love to see this study done again with post-COVID data.
• Iceberger, cold and addictive.
• The limits of egg recognition: testing acceptance thresholds of American robins in response to decreasingly egg-shaped objects in the nest. I will never stop being fascinated by “treating animals as neural networks” studies.
• A lunar pandemic, when people worried about a pandemic coming from the Apollo missions.

COVID-19 adjacent

• Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine, pretty cool.
• Did people really drink bleach to prevent COVID-19? A tale of problematic respondents and a guide for measuring rare events in survey data
• The impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on university students’ dietary intake, physical activity, and sedentary behaviour
• How Many Microcovids Would You Spend on a Burrito? on microcovid.org
• A vaccine DIY: RaDVaC

Politics & society

• Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of Activism. See also We Built Google. This Is Not the Company We Want to Work For.
• Amazon Is Forcing Its Warehouse Workers Into Brutal ‘Megacycle’ Shifts
• Speculation about effects of powerful persuasion tools, on what could happen if we get powerful tools for creating propaganda.
• Border agents can search phones freely under new circuit court ruling :(
• Is This Beverly Hills Cop Playing Sublime’s ‘Santeria’ to Avoid Being Live-Streamed?, the most cyberpunk news of recent months.
• Policy of deliberate ambiguity, a cool Wikipedia article.
• So, Scott Alexander is back in what is basically SlateStarCodex II, the New York Times finally released their article about him and there was some drama about it. I don’t love Scott’s reply nor Matthew Yglesias’ one (I don’t think they address the most important stuff that is raised on the NYT article) but I think they give important context on some of the NYT claims.